Vancouver software developer Clio announces $6 million funding round

A Vancouver software developer makes a milestone leap forward today in New York with the unveiling of a $6 million financing deal.

Clio, which has created a set of cloud-based business management tools for lawyers, is making the announcement in New York on opening day of the 30th annual ALM LegalTech conference and trade show — the world's largest legal tech gathering that attracts 20,000 to 30,000 people associated with the legal profession.

It's not a big financing in the context of B.C.'s globe-spanning mining sector, but for the burgeoning Internet sector in B.C., it's major news.

In British Columbia, only Glitch, a social game company belonging to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, is larger with $17 million raised through three rounds of funding.

Tech-sector darling Hootsuite, which aggregates and organizes content from Twitter and was rumoured in October to be on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's radar, has received about $5 million to date including a single round of $3 million in September 2011.

Clio has grown to 50 employees since it was founded in 2007 by Jack Newton and Rian Gauvreau and is already being used by what Newton describes as "thousands" of solo and small law firms across North America.

Newton told The Vancouver Sun from New York that the company's growth to date has been by word of mouth in the legal community and that the new funding will support both hiring of additional staff and a marketing drive.

Newton has a background in software development while Gauvreau formerly worked in information technology for a large law firm.

Clio targets the majority of lawyers — those working solo or in small-scale firms — who want a reliable, convenient, low-cost method for managing their work flow.

It is designed to streamline an array of tasks — including billable hours spent on individual projects or "matters" as well as provide a secure, mobile, encrypted cloud-based portal for transmitting documents and email strings, an appointment book, and billing services — for a monthly $49 fee.

A recent Law Society of British Columbia study found that 75 per cent of firms in B.C. are solo, and that another 19 per cent had two to five lawyers.

The trend across North America is similar.

"The original idea for Clio came out of a conversation among myself and my co-founder Rian Gauvreau and the Law Society of British Columbia. There was a fairly small minority of lawyers that used a practice management system of any kind," Newton said.

"A practice management system is often the only kind of support they have to keep them on top of their practice.

"There was a dozen desktop-based products that for the large part had been built in the 1980s and really remained relatively unchanged in the last two decades.

"There was nobody that was embracing the kind of web based delivery model for [legal sector] software. You just subscribe to Clio and you're up and running literally in a matter of seconds."

Boris Wertz, a Vancouver-based Acton partner, said the legal services market is ripe for "disruption."

"In a time where technology really drives productivity and efficiency, the small guys just never have the internal resources to build technology that can help them achieve those goals," Wertz said.

"Something like Clio sits in the cloud and is very easy to reach — you can access it from everywhere, the courtroom, from your office. It's a huge value proposition for every small and medium sized lawyer."

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